“Vizine”

Lil Wayne’s mixtapes don’t have the gravity they used to. It’s simple attrition—he’s more than 20 years deep and has weathered incarceration, addiction, and near-terminal overexposure. Wayne’s no longer the ascendent king remaking Jay-Z’s beats in his image. Still, he’s a legend: respected, widely studied, and, crucially, familiar. So it makes sense that in recent years, while his recent beat-jacking exercises have been spotty, he’s caught the ghost on little-heard reunions with old friends, Solange albums, and in little moments of exaltation.

His new song, “Vizine,” will catch you off-guard. It’s moody in a playful way, like a nightmare rendered for children. In a push-and-pull with self-pity, he intones “Why me?” over and over, eyeballs the distance between where he is now and his creative peak, and reminiscences about New Orleans before the hurricane pushed him to Miami and immortality. That acknowledgement of his creative shortcomings marks a hard break in Wayne’s on-record persona. He lets himself sink into middle age, but quips about the darkness he’s still adjacent to (“Have my goons kidnap your offsprings/While I was working on my golf swing”). There are times where his syntax betrays him: “I could make the devil get cold feet” can work as an of-the-moment taunt, but with Wayne, it’s tough to read the line as anything but a longing gaze at his past. “Vizine” sounds like 2007’s despondent, disoriented “I Feel Like Dying,” remade from memory by someone who’s sober now, but remembers the feeling. It’s strange and a little uncomfortable and exhilaratingly new.